The rapid growth of the World Wide Web began with the development of an on-line browser having a graphical user interface. Graphical interfaces provide a number of important advantages, including the ability to rapidly scroll through a document to get to a particular point of interest. Moreover, the ability to interact with a medium other than text (i.e. images or audio) increases the rate at which information can be conveyed since an image often conveys an idea faster and more efficiently than text.
While graphical browsers provide an adequate interface for text and images, they provide an inadequate interface for video programs. The sequential nature of the video and audio components of a video program impedes rapid access to such programs on the World Wide Web by graphical browsers. Furthermore, because of the limited bandwidth of networks supporting the World Wide Web, and particularly the limitations of most users' connections to such networks, it takes a long time to transmit a program with its full content. For example, at a connection speed of 28,800 bits per second, it could take up to about 45 minutes to transmit even a three or four minute audiovisual segment with sound and full-motion video. As a result, video program providers sometimes form a compressed version of the video program by manually extracting and retaining selected frames from the program while other frames are discarded. The selected frames and accompanying text, typically taken from a transcript of the program, result in a document that may subsequently be made available over the World Wide Web. However, the generation of this document is typically a tedious and time consuming task since it must be created by a manual process.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a rendition of a video program which can be automatically generated and which allows easy interaction with graphical browsers with a minimum of information loss.